One backlog for every digital project
A public vocational training agency uses Airtable as a customizable product backlog to manage sprints across multiple digital transformation projects. The digital transformation team and IT coordinate work to implement business needs from a flexible system that project leads adopted more than five years ago, replacing rigid tools and enabling rapid workflow creation during a period of urgent remote-operations demand.
The problem
Project leads needed a way to manage a product backlog and coordinate sprints across several concurrent digital transformation projects, but rigid off-the-shelf project management tools did not flex to the way the team actually worked.
Coordinating cross-functional tasks between the digital transformation team and IT was harder without a system either group could adapt on its own terms.
What they built
Project leads built a customizable product backlog in Airtable to prioritize work and plan sprints across multiple projects at once, giving each project its own tracked scope inside a single flexible system.
The backlog coordinates cross-functional task assignment between the digital transformation team and IT, so implementation work tied to business needs moves through one shared structure instead of separate trackers.
The outcome
The team gained the autonomy to build and adjust workflows on its own, replacing a rigid tool that could not keep pace with how the projects actually ran.
That flexibility proved decisive during a period of urgent digitalization demand, when the team needed to stand up new workflows quickly, and the same backlog structure has remained in daily use for more than five years since.
Inside the solution
Product Backlog and Sprint Management
Program & Project Management
- Product backlog prioritization and sprint planning
- Multi-project sprint tracking and coordination
- Cross-functional task assignment between digital transformation and IT
- Need for customizable project management beyond rigid tools
- Coordination challenges across multiple concurrent projects
- Ease of use and rapid deployment compared with alternatives
- Autonomy for teams to build and manage their own workflows
- Enabled rapid digitalization during a period of urgent demand
- Digital Transformation
- IT
- No third-party integrations recorded for this workflow
Product backlog and sprint management for digital transformation
Run one flexible product backlog across every digital transformation project: prioritize items, plan sprints, and route work between your digital team and IT from a single shared board. Automations turn incoming business requests into backlog items and report delivery back, while AI fields draft implementation briefs, sprint recaps, and triage suggestions for you.
From rigid tooling to a flexible cross-project backlog
Copy the templates
Structure the backlog by project
Assign across teams
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Rigid off-the-shelf tools did not adapt to how the projects actually worked. A customizable backlog let project leads shape the workflow themselves rather than forcing the work into a fixed structure.
Each project's backlog items are tracked in the same base but organized so sprint planning and prioritization can happen per project without losing the shared view across all of them.
Backlog items carry a cross-functional assignment, so implementation tasks tied to business needs route to IT from the same record the digital transformation team plans against.
The flexibility that let the team stand up new workflows quickly during a period of urgent digitalization demand is the same flexibility that has kept the backlog useful as project needs have continued to change.
Not for this workflow. The account has explored AI-assisted status and risk summaries for broader project portfolio work, and a structured backlog like this one is the kind of foundation those AI workflows would draw on.